Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

This research project provides a comparative analysis of energy-efficient routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), focusing on clustering-based approaches such as LEACH, PEGASIS, and their more recent variants, which aim to balance energy consumption across sensor nodes.

Using a network simulator (NS-2/NS-3 or a custom Python-based simulation), the study models a field of randomly deployed sensor nodes reporting to a base station, and measures network lifetime (time until first/last node death), energy dissipation per round, and packet delivery ratio across the compared protocols.

The paper also proposes and evaluates a modified cluster-head selection heuristic that factors in residual energy and distance-to-base-station, showing measurable improvement in network lifetime over the baseline LEACH protocol in the simulated scenarios.

Detailed Project Description

Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks investigates a current research problem: it surveys existing approaches, defines a methodology, implements or simulates the proposed solution and compares results with baselines.

How It Works
1. Literature is reviewed to identify limitations of existing methods.
2. A methodology / architecture is proposed to address them.
3. Experiments or simulations are run on standard datasets or test-beds.
4. Results are compared with baselines and discussed with limitations and future scope.

Technology Roles
- Python
- NS-3
- WSN
- LEACH
- Simulation

Implementation Steps
1. Collect and read recent papers; summarise methods, datasets and reported results.
2. Identify the research gap and state the problem and objectives precisely.
3. Design the proposed methodology / architecture and the evaluation plan.
4. Implement or simulate it using NS-3 / Python Simulation, MATLAB (for result plotting).
5. Run experiments on standard datasets or test-beds and record metrics.
6. Compare against baselines, discuss limitations and future scope.
7. Write the report/paper with figures, tables and references.

Key Features
- Literature survey
- Proposed methodology
- Experimental evaluation
- Comparative results

Expected Output
On completion the student will have a documented study with methodology, results tables/figures and conclusions suitable for a report or paper.

Deliverables
- Literature summary table
- Methodology and system design
- Experimental results with comparison
- Report / paper-ready document